Ashley Jane Lewis is a new media artist and creative technologist with a focus on interactive installations, bio art, social justice and speculative design. She holds degrees in New Media Art from Toronto Metropolitan University and ITP from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Her artistic practice explores Black cultures of the past, present and future through computational and analog mediums including coding and digital and physical fabrication, textiles, data weaving, microorganisms and live performance. Her practice is tied to science and actively incorporates living organisms like slime mold, mycelium and other organic cultures to explore ways of decentralizing humans and imagine collective, multi-species survival. Ashley recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the inaugural cohort of Black scholars to TMU’s Black Scholarship Institute.
Her advocacy work as an educator and activist has enabled her to push tech institutions to explore new equitable policies that better consider the safety of women, Black people and queer identities. As an educator, Ashley has taught more than 3,500 young people how to code, earning her press coverage as a tech activist from Reader’s Digest, Huffington Post, Metro News and Washington Square News. Ashley has taught at CultureHub NYC, Genspace, InterAccess, Toronto Metropolitan University, OCAD University, Parsons and the School for Poetic Computation, to name a few. Ashley was most recently featured in a Google series for their Black Women Techmakers campaign. This Webby Award-winning series aims to show the diversity of creative, socially driven practices in technology.